Agile value chains for manufacturing – implications for performance measures

This paper will focus on the implications for value chain performance measures arising from the rapidly emerging requirement for agility both within individual business units and across sophisticated manufacturing value chains. Recent developments in the way companies are expected to respond to rapid and unpredictable change in the external environment have resulted in new paradigms for manufacturing which comprise a combination of leanness, agility and virtual enterprises. The primary focus of academic researchers has been in the area of determining how agility is attained in order that organisational structures can best be designed. However, the concept that “what you measure is what you get” is equally valid for virtual organisations as it has always been for stand‐alone manufacturing businesses. This paper therefore discusses the requirements for new approaches to performance measures and raises some of the issues that need to be developed further in support of the concept of agility.